DeKalb County voter turnout low for primary election, says clerk

DeKALB – With more than 300 election judges spread out across 69 precincts, DeKalb County was ready for a busy primary election, but DeKalb County Clerk and Recorder Tasha Sims said it was a slow election day.

Shortly after 2 p.m., Sims said there’s no way voter turnout for the primary election on Tuesday would eclipse the voter turnout rate in 2020, the last time a primary was held for a general election.

“I would love to see similar to the last, the 2020 [primary election] we had about 25% [voter turnout rate]. We’re not going to get there, I know that. At this rate, my goal is, I’m hoping to get at least over 10%,” Sims said. “I think the DeKalb numbers, you know throughout the day, will kind of increase. There’s been more activity over there, obviously, so hopefully that’ll start bringing our numbers up a bit, but overall our turn out is going to be fairly low.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, DeKalb County Clerk and Recorder’s Office had received 1,392 completed mail-in ballots, out of 2,148 sent out to permanent vote-by-mail voters.

Sims said 1,380 were submitted during the early voting period.

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Joe Shippy, from DeKalb, votes in the primary election Tuesday, March 19, 2024, in the polling place at Westminster Presbyterian Church in DeKalb. (Mark Busch)

Those two subsets of voters are expected to be the first votes tallied online, when the polls close at 7 p.m., Tasha said.

Depending on where they live, DeKalb County voters helped decide the results of six different contested primary races for state and federal offices in the March 19 primary election, including one of the most contested races in the state.

That race, featuring Democratic and Republican primary ballots that will dictate who voters will choose between for the Illinois House 76th District in the Nov. 5 general election, could be decided by DeKalb voters.

Democrats Cohen Barnes, Amy “Murri” Briel and Carolyn “Morris” Zasada are all vying be replace state Rep. Lance Yednock, D-Ottawa, who decided he would not seek reelection in the 76th District in 2024. Republicans Liz Bishop and Crystal Loughran are running for the Republican Party nomination for the Illinois House of Representatives seat.

As of 2 p.m., 125 voters had filled out a primary ballot at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 830 N. Annie Glidden Road in DeKalb. One of the election judges working that polling place was Eleanor Grada Romero, a DeKalb High School senior.

“I just don’t see why you wouldn’t [be an election judge], Grada Romero, 17, said. “I feel like it’s a cool way to know about, I guess just how the election works, and what goes behind it. And honestly, you do get paid, so I just don’t see a con. I tried to get a bunch of my friends to do it.”

Any high school junior or senior, with a 3.0 GPA and permission from their guardians and school, can be employed as an election judge in DeKalb County, Sims said.

“We actually try to recruit high school students as much as we can, we always tell them that it looks good on your job applications or college resume,” Sims said. “We like to try to get the younger people involved.”

Michael Brown, also an election judge at the Westminster Presbyterian Church polling place, said he’s been doing the job since 2021 because he wanted to learn how the process worked.

“It was ignorant to me until I got involved,” said Brown, who thinks the general public is unaware of how much physical paper work is still required on election day. “We’ve got this checkmark, and this checkmark, but you know we have to cross check ... we work very hard to do that, make sure our counts are right.”

After undergoing training, election judges make $200 for their day manning a polling place. In 2023, the DeKalb County Board voted to raise that pay rate from up to $150, after Illinois raised the total amount it would reimburse counties for paying election judges.

Months before the 2022 June Primary Election in Illinois, DeKalb County still needed more than 100 people to work the polls, but since the pay increase the DeKalb County Clerk and Recorder has not had to hustle to get enough election judges before election day.

Sims said DeKalb County had 331 election judges on hand for the primary election – she hopes to have more than 400 for the Nov. 5 General Election – partly because she was expecting a busier than usual voter turnout on Tuesday.

“In a primary you only have to have three judges per precinct, but some of them we were able to increase the amount of judges just because going into this election, I mean, in the early parts of it I really thought we were going to have a decent turnout, and we were going to have a good amount of people. So I was very happy to know that we had so many judges that were able to work, but as you know it’s kind of slowed down as the day’s gone on.”